You also need to consider the width of the streets.

The typical suburban standard requires 12 foot traffic lanes and 10 foot parking lanes (44 foot street width).

New Urbanists, who design a connected street grid, have generally gone back to the traditional street width, 10 foot traffic lanes and 8 foot parking lanes (36 foot street width).

In some cases, New Urbanists have gone even further. Andres Duany has designed neighborhood streets as narrow as 19 feet. He calls them “yield streets,” because if two cars are going in opposite directions they cannot pass each other and one must yield by pulling into the parking lane.

Narrower streets are needed to slow down traffic when you have a connected street system that lets traffic drive through neighborhoods. You can imagine that “yield streets” slow traffic considerably. If this subdivision were built with a connected grid of yield streets, it would require less asphalt than it does with its current cul-de-sacs.

Developers build those wide streets, because they are generally required by law.

Interesting insight. And it helps explain why this kind of development is popular worldwide (is in fact nearly the only kind of development done anymore, anywhere). I had thought it was an American (and English) cultural thing, an expression of the “back to (faux) nature” zeitgeist that’s very strong in both countries.

However, I think the poster grossly overstated the amount of additional asphalt necessary to turn that superblock into a grid. You don’t need a grid that tightly packed in order to gain the benefits of a grid, and in fact most grids aren’t comprised of such tiny blocks.

Now the bad news: “…few experts expect the growth to continue this year, in part because transit systems across the country are raising fares and cutting service as the tax revenue they rely on plummets during the recession.”

However, the Times’ experts do not include the peak-oil-induced energy price hikes and shortages of the future in their calculations. Even if the ridership surge falters, it will surge again in future years. With all that stimulus cash floating around, the time to add capacity is now.

This gets, however, to something I wrote about on Room 8 a year or so ago. The suburbs could be easily retrofit to biking communities by purchasing and paving small strips of land between houses as bicycle-and-pedestrian-only rights of way.

The bike routes would combine these “pass throughs” and low-traffic streets interior to subdivisions. Cyclists would use the “pass-throughs” to travel between subdivisions, without having to ride on the busy arterials. Must cross them at their own traffic lights. On the map, Convict Hill Road and Beckett Road are arterials. With pass throughs, cyclist could have routes that bypass them.

The motor vehicles would squeeze on to those arterials.

As lame as he may be, Kevin Parker was actually the least-objectionable candidate in the Democratic primary — his opponents were Council members Kendall Stewart and Simcha Felder.

The link to this article is broken; the URL leaves out the “htt” in “http”.

“You want to put tolls on the Willis Avenue Bridge, the Madison Avenue Bridge?” Hassle-Thompson asked. “And you have to ask what my position is?”

Why didn’t she say, “you want to cut bus and train service and raise fares, and you have to ask what my position is?” That’s what Hassle-Thompson’s position is: favoring the driving minority over the transit-riding majority.

“If it’s 1 cent, I’m against it,” said state Sen. Kevin Parker (D-Brooklyn).

Wait a minute. That guy got reelected? The people of Flatbush must be idiots.